Skeleton Canyon (20 page)

Ernie stopped what he was doing. “The one Brianna O’Brien got kicked off the cheerleading squad over?”

“One and the same.”

“We’d better go talk to him. Anything else?”

“The last entry is intriguing. It says, ‘My mother is a liar.’ “

“That’s all?”

“That’s it.”

Ernie frowned. “It sounds as though there’s a possibility that we’re dealing with two liars here—like mother like daughter.”

“It does sound that way,” Joanna agreed. Just then she heard the noisy clamor of what must have been several approaching vehicles. “I’d better go up and see who’s here.”

“Go ahead,” Ernie told her. “I’ll keep working. If Jaime’s finally dug himself out of that sand trap, tell him to get his ass down here. I need him to establish a grid and start bagging up some of this evidence. I don’t like the sound of that thunder. I want this stuff out of here before it rains, not after.”

Up until then, Joanna had been so preoccupied with what was going on that she hadn’t paid any attention to the weather. Now, though, she looked up. Earlier the sky had been simply overcast. Now it was threateningly so. A storm was definitely brewing. Not only would they need to gather the evidence as quickly as possible, Joanna realized, they would also need to get all the vehicles back across that enormous wash before the rain arrived. Then, with a sudden pang of guilt, Joanna realized she had spent more than an hour too busy to give the missing Angie Kellogg a single thought.

Hurriedly, she scrambled back up to the top of the ridge. The crest looked like a traffic jam. Vehicles were parked single file behind Joanna’s Eagle. First came Ernie’s van, followed by a wrecker from Willcox big enough to haul semis. Bringing up the rear was Frankie Stoddard’s Range Rover. Dennis Hacker’s Hummer, which once had been parked directly behind the Eagle, now was nowhere in sight.

Jaime Carbajal met Joanna at the lip of the cliff. “Sorry it took so long, Sheriff Brady. We ended up having to wait for the wrecker after all.”

“That’s okay. Hurry, though. Ernie wants you down there on the double, establishing a grid and bagging evidence. What about Mr. Hacker?”

“We ran into him about half a mile back. He’s off searching for Angie Kellogg.”

“No one’s heard from her or seen her?” Joanna asked. “Not so far.”

Looking at the sky and worrying that she had waited too long, Joanna hurried over to Ernie’s van and commandeered the radio. “Tica,” she said when the dispatcher answered. “Where are the guys from Search and Rescue?”

“They’re on the way,” Tica responded.

“Tell them we’ve got an inexperienced hiker lost out here in the Peloncillos, and it looks like a big storm is coming. If they need something of Angie’s to give the dogs her scent, have them get in touch with her boss, Bobo Jenkins, at the Blue Moon up in Brewery Gulch.”

By the time Joanna got off the radio, Frankie Stoddard was standing directly behind her. “So what gives?” the private investigator asked. “Is it her?” she asked, nodding in the direction of the wreck.

Joanna nodded. “We’re pretty sure,” she said. “Pending positive ID, of course.”

“And she just ran off the cliff here?”

“That’s how it looks.”

For a long moment, Frankie stood with her arms crossed, staring down at the wreck. “I know it’s your job to notify the parents,” she said at last. “But I’d guess you’re going to be tied up here for quite some time. If you’d like, I could drive back into town and tell the O’Briens that there’s been a fatality accident out here and the victim is most likely their daughter.”

Notifying the O’Briens was a task Joanna had been dreading from the moment she looked over the edge of the cliff and saw the smashed red pickup far below. “Once we get the body back to town, we’ll need them to come do an official identification, but you’re sure you wouldn’t mind telling them initially?”

Frankie Stoddard shook her head sadly. “Mr. O’Brien hired me to find his daughter,” she said. “It looks as though I have.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The next several hours passed in a blur of activity. While awaiting the arrival of the Search and Rescue unit, Joanna stayed on the scene of the accident investigation. Overhead, the sky went from merely overcast to dark and threatening. The constant and ominous rumble of thunder to the south put real urgency into the race to gather evidence.

Joanna, along with Jaime Carbajal, worked at combing the steep hillside, bagging, logging, and labeling the debris they found there. She kept hoping one of them would stumble over the second volume of Brianna’s journal, but so far it hadn’t been found. Joanna and Jaime had just been joined by two additional deputies, Lindsey and Raymond, when Ernie called Joanna over to the truck.

“I’m about to give the wrecker operator the all-clear to haul this away, but f wanted you to take a look first,” he said, motioning Joanna in the direction of the truck’s interior. “See anything strange?”

Joanna looked inside. At first glance, there was nothing to see. The truck was absolutely empty. With both doors missing and both the windshield and back window broken out, there was nothing loose, including the driver, that hadn’t been shaken out during the truck’s roll down the mountain. On the gray leather headrest of the driver’s seat was a single smear that looked like blood, but that single stain was all there was.

Joanna had been there when the truck was removed from the body. She had seen the terrible laceration on the back of Brianna’s skull, a blow so severe that it had left part of her brain exposed. With a wound like that, there should have been blood. Lots of it.

“Where’s the spatter?” Joanna asked.

“Precisely,” Ernie returned. “You’re definitely starting to get the hang of this.”

Joanna appreciated her investigator’s unsolicited compliment, but there was no time to savor it. “So what?” she asked. “You
^’
re saying Brianna was already dead when the pickup went over the edge?”

“It’s a possibility,” Ernie said. “A distinct possibility.”

Joanna felt yet another emotional hole open up and swallow her. On Saturday afternoon David O’Brien had expressed his fear—no, his firm belief—that something terrible had happened to his daughter. He had wanted Joanna to call in the FBI immediately. Had she done so? No. Instead, Sheriff Joanna Brady had taken refuge in the twenty-four-hour missing persons cop-out. She had done nothing. She wondered now if the outcome would have been any less fatal had she made a different decision.

“What about the other journal?” Joanna asked. “It’s not out on the hill. We’ve searched every inch of it. I thought maybe it might be inside here, under the seat or behind it.”

Ernie shook his head. “Believe Inc, this cab is clean as a whistle. So maybe whoever killed her took the book with him. Maybe she had written something in it that was incriminating.”

Joanna nodded, remembering the last entry in the other journal. “My mother is a liar.”

While Ernie went off to confer with the tow truck driver, Joanna returned to the spot at the bottom of the cliff where Doc Winfield had just finished zipping the body bag closed. As the two deputies loaded it into a basket, George turned to Joanna.

“I’m worried about trying to maneuver the body up that trail. Looks to me as though it’s going to be next to impossible. Do you think Mr. Hacker would mind if we used his block and tackle?”

Joanna wasn’t much interested in what Dennis Hacker would or wouldn’t mind. “He left it here,” she said. “He must have meant for us to use it.”

While Winfield attached the come-along to the basket, one of the deputies took the rest of the block and tackle back up the cliff. Even with Detective Carbajal and the two deputies to apply muscle, pulling the body up was still a tricky process. The face of the ridge wasn’t smooth. More than once the basket got hung up, once on a clump of mesquite and another time it wedged in underneath a jagged outcropping of rock. The second stall was far more serious than the first. With Doc Winfield on his hands and knees at the edge of the cliff shouting instructions, Joanna had to work her way out onto a narrow ledge far enough to pry the basket loose. The storm was almost on them by then. Sand and grit flew in her eyes, and the force necessary to set the basket free also threatened to knock Joanna off her precarious perch. It took half a dozen tries before the basket swung free and disappeared overhead.

“Good work,” Ernie said, stretching out a hand to pull Joanna back to the relative safety of a newly made path. “It’s a wonder you didn’t break your neck.”

Joanna was standing there catching her breath when she heard Doc Winfield’s shout. “Hey, Ernie. Come on up. There’s something here you need to see. Quick, before the wind blows it away.”

Grumbling, Ernie did as he was told, with Joanna close on his heels. When Joanna reached the top and could see, George Winfield was still on his hands and knees, staring intently into a scraggly clump of yellowed grass. “What’s this look like to you?” he asked.

Wedging his way between Jaime and one of the deputies, Ernie Carpenter dropped to the ground beside Winfield. The detective, too, stared into the grass. “I’ll be damned!” he exclaimed a moment later.

Joanna, coming up behind the group, was almost run over by Jaime, who was heading for the van at a gallop. “What’s going on?” she asked.

“Ernie’ll need a set of hemostats,” he said. “I’m going to get them, along with the evidence log and the tape measure.”

“And evidence bags,” Ernie called after him. “I’m all out of the small ones.”

Catching up with the others, Joanna peered over Ernie’s shoulder and saw nothing. “What did you find?” she asked.

“A hair,” Ernie answered. “A single strand of long blond hair.”

“You’re thinking the same thing I am, aren’t you?” George Winfield said, “‘That she was dead long before she hit the ground.
^”

Ernie nodded. “I’m afraid so,
^”
he said.

Angie knew the storm was brewing. She was out on the flat now and traveling at an angle toward the road, but behind her in the mountains and to the east of them, she could see a block torrent of rain falling from the sky. She had always been afraid of thunderstorms. One of the girls in her first grade class in Battle Creek had been hit and killed by lightning at an outdoor barbecue. There was nothing for it, though, but to keep walking.

A chill wind shrieked through the three-foot-tall grass. Lightning forked across the sky and thunder rumbled all around her. Angie wore jeans and boots and a long-sleeved shirt, but nothing waterproof. She hadn’t expected to be out in the rain on foot. She hadn’t expected to be in the desert alone.

The wilderness was still a frightening and alien place to her. Watching the desert birds was wonderful, but there were other desert dwellers that weren’t nearly so pleasant. She had heard, for example, that snakes and Gila monsters came out in advance of rain storms. Archie McBride had told her that, and Willy had backed him up. They both claimed that a Gila monster bite could kill you within a matter of minutes. A lot of what Archie and Willy said was so much bullshit. It was possible they had just been teasing her with more of their tall tales. Still, out there all by herself, with the wind whistling and the glass bent almost double, it seemed likely that they had told the truth.

In the course of hours of waiting and walking, Angie Kellogg had moved beyond being hurt. Now she was simply mad. “Damn you anyway, Dennis Hacker,” she shouted into the screeching wind. “Go ahead and laugh. See if I care.”

“You think it’s hers, then?” Joanna asked, watching Ernie fight the windblown hair into an equally windblown glassine bag.

“Who else’s would it be?” he asked. “As soon as we can get the body transported, we’ll have to search the rest of the area up here, just in case. And we’re going to have to hurry. The storm’s almost here. Get her loaded into that truck on the double.”

“Truck?” Joanna asked.

Ernie nodded. “Deputy Raymond brought along his pickup. He can take her back to Bisbee in that.”

Joanna looked at Matt Raymond’s Ford F-100 parked four vehicles down the hill. Then she looked back at the basket and the body bag. “No,” she said.

“What do you mean, no?” Ernie countered.

“Just what I said. We’re not going to haul Brianna O’Brien’s body back to town in the bed of a pickup truck like she was a sack of potatoes or a bale of hay. Put her in my Eagle.”

That announcement stunned the little group gathered around the body basket into total silence. Joanna caught the questioning look George Winfield leveled in her direction. “Are you sure?” he asked.

“I’m sure,” she said. “Load her up.”

As Deputies Raymond and Lindsey hurried to comply, Joanna turned back to the others, “Doc Winfield and I will go on ahead. The rest of you, don’t spend too much lime looking, for evidence. It looks like this storm’s going to be a doozy, It’s the first one of the season, so most of the water should soak in, hut I don’t want anybody taking any chances with that wash.” She aimed the last sentence directly at Jaime Carbajal, who grinned apologetically.

“Don’t worry, Sheriff Brady,” he said. “I’ve learned my lesson. Besides, if we get into any trouble, the wrecker’s already here.”

“I don’t even want to think about it,” she said. With the storm boiling in from the south, the possibility of vehicles getting stuck was one consideration. What was far worse, however, was the thought of Angie, out by herself, lost and afraid in a storm of that magnitude. She knew nothing at all about the desert. If a fully loaded vehicle couldn’t stand up to a flash flood, what would happen to her if she made the mistake of stepping into a raging, water-filled wash?

l don’t want to think about that, either,
Joanna told herself. She had summoned Search and Rescue and made sure they were doing their job. For now, that was the best she could do.

The rain hit long before Angie made it to the road. Within seconds she was soaked to the skin. Her hair was plastered down around her face. The downpour was startlingly cold.
Looking like this, I’ll never catch a ride,
she thought despairingly as she ducked through the strands of barbed wire that stood between her and the narrow ribbon of pavement. Angie was enough of a hitchhiking veteran to know that most drivers wouldn’t stop for someone who was soaking wet. Why would they want to put some muddy bedraggled wreck into a perfectly clean and dry car?